Book review: Another brilliant trip orchestrated by Pynchon

Are you ready for another plunge into Thomas Pynchon’s mad swirl of a postmodern paranoia-laced cityscape, conjured up by the author of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Against the Day”? Do you delight in levels ...

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By
Sam Coale
Posted Oct. 6, 2013 @ 12:01 am

Are you ready for another plunge into Thomas Pynchon’s mad swirl of a postmodern paranoia-laced cityscape, conjured up by the author of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Against the Day”? Do you delight in levels, layers and labyrinths of consciousness and conspiracy, of mazes and mysteries that feed upon themselves, double back and interpenetrate one another, proliferate, expand and swallow our conventional world like some toxic virus on steroids?

Maxine Tarnow runs a fraud-investigating agency, “Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em,” with the hope that she can “Jail ’Em” and stumbles upon dummy companies set up to funnel Gabriel Ice’s billions to Arab Emirates for some possible vast extravaganza of a plan that may support jihad, fight jihad or create its own jihad.

We’re led into DeepArcher, a secret network below the surface of cyberspace as we know it in which spies, conspirators, money launderers, mobsters and computer nerds operate, a place of dark endless corridors that know no bounds that lead to “the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information … the vast undefined anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of self-resonant fantasies.”

The trip — and it is that with a vengeance — involves such diverse and often cartoonish characters as Reg Despard, the documentary filmmaker; Rocky Slagiatt and Igor Dashkov, American and Russian mobsters; Conkling Speedwell, a “private nose”; Felix Boingueaux, who embezzles funds from points-of-sale; Shae and Bruno in a sexual threesome with Vip Epperdew … I could go on.

Pynchon attacks the suburbanization of America, the outrageously ebullient corruption of international capitalism, “a pyramid racket on a global scale,” — all of which culminates in 9/11: the ultimate conspiracy and catastrophe, the big bang.

This rollicking, riotous, brilliantly rambling major novel is structured like the Web — open one website and it’ll lead you onward into the black hole at its center and the center of existence. This is a chilling, funny, intricate nightmare that’ll engulf you, built upon the bleeding edge of technology that lures us “into a void incalculably fertile with invisible links.”